


The rite of movement

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Unsatisfying Sex, summer of 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-14 21:32:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18484783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: He always closes his eyes when the tip of his cock slides into her, and his mouth falls open when she settles onto him.But her thoughts are still fixed on the video review: even as he leans forward to bite her collarbone, surely forceful enough to leave a mark, all she can think about is the slouch of her lower back and the stiffness in her hips, resisting the soft upholstery. She can see in her mind's eye an anatomical diagram of herself with the wrong angles circled in red.





	The rite of movement

Every morning, six mornings a week, is the same routine: the 6am alarm, rolling out of bed before the opportunity to drift off again presents itself, a protein shake and a few careful stretches on the kitchen floor to assess the state of her shins and calves while she waits for the kettle, hot water with lemon, multitasking with breathing exercises in the shower, a checklist of trite affirmations tacked up next to the bathroom mirror to rattle off aloud first through a mouthful of toothpaste and then as she pats moisturizer into her cheeks, then dressed by quarter to seven and out the door, where Scott's already waiting in the driveway with coffee for her in a thermos in the car.

 _We've done hard things before and we can do them again_ , she says every day to his  _Good morning, Tess_  as she opens the passenger side door; then to her  _This is stupid_ , every day he answers,  _Keep smiling 'til your face freezes that way_ ; then Gerschwin on the stereo for the fifteen-minute drive to the rink.

At the rink, every morning, six mornings a week, there's another suite of routines. More stretching, the left skate on first and then the right, Scott quicker to lace up than her and on the ice first, lingering by the boards for her to catch up to him; then drills for hours on the ice and off, on the barest and most fundamental movements, as stripped down as their team of trainers could make them, until her muscle memory is recalibrated into a new foundation to build up from again.

Scott keeps a close eye on her, and he pipes up with more affirmations at irregular intervals to keep her on her toes.

"Together we can reach any goal, remember," he says to her one afternoon a few weeks in to the new routine, when they're wrapping up in the weight room in the midafternoon.

"Maybe not this goal," she says.

"Just imagine how nice my ass is gonna be when we're finished," he says. "Visualize it."

"That one's not on the list," she says.

"Maybe they gave me a different list with more affirmations on it," he says.

She rises from the floor and steps over him toward the locker room, and he takes the moment she's within arm's reach to swat her lightly on her own ass, already taking a different shape than it had six weeks ago.

Not every evening, because by the end of the day she's bone-weary as often as not, but enough evenings, Scott walks her up the stairs to her front door instead of waiting to make sure she's unlocked it and driving home by himself. The last vestige of what used to be familiar about her own body, she thought wryly the first time he prompted her to invite him inside and led her to her own bedroom.

Today it's early evening by the time they finish a video review of a drill from yesterday over a light dinner she didn't have the appetite to finish, and when in her driveway he looks reluctant to leave, she leads him up the steps herself and through the foyer to the chesterfield in the living room.

She pushes him backward and straddles him, and he bites his lip, and there's nothing reluctant about the way he reaches between them to unbutton his own jeans, or pulls her sweatshirt over her head, or tugs at her leggings, still reaching for her in the moment she has to stand up to get them off.

He always closes his eyes when the tip of his cock slides into her, and his mouth falls open when she settles onto him.

But her thoughts are still fixed on the video review: even as he leans forward to bite her collarbone, surely forceful enough to leave a mark, all she can think about is the slouch of her lower back and the stiffness in her hips, resisting the soft upholstery. She can see in her mind's eye an anatomical diagram of herself with the wrong angles circled in red.

Taking a deep breath—Scott tugs the hair at the nape of her neck, clearly thinking it's the depth or the angle—she braces her hands on his shoulders and makes the adjustment: opening her hips a few millimetres more, feeling how it changes the alignment of her pelvis with her spine. His eyes fly open.

"Are you hurt," he says. "We'll stop," and he does, moving his hands to her waist as if to lift her off of him.

"What? No, I'm fine," she says, tipping her pelvis backward to punctuate the point, making him gasp and throb inside her.

"I felt you shifting around like you're sore, we shouldn't push it," he says, and then he does take her by the waist, and rearranges her so she's sitting across his lap and not astride it.

"I'm sorry," she says, and buries her face in his neck, eyes shut tight. The image of her pelvis's misalignment may as well be seared into her eyelids.

"Nah," he says. His hands return to her hair but only to stroke it, letting it down from its chignon and gently untangling it, giving her time.

"What's that faraway look," he asks when she opens her eyes again, brushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "We're fine, right?"

"We're fine," she says. "I just—"

Maybe he's right that she's sore, although she can't place it: it's not the routine acute pain of her shins, or any other entry from her catalogue of typical aches.

"It's been a long week," he finishes the sentence for her.

"It has," she says, and he looks relieved.

"Shower it off and I'll order pad thai, it'll be here by the time you're finished," he says, and it's as good a plan as any.

Between training and the various errands of the immediate postseason and yes, exhaustion, the work is exhausting, which is reassuring to her in its own way, it's a couple of weeks before she has an opportunity to invite Scott into her bedroom again. His hands on her are welcome, but she feels slow to respond to him, disconnected in the newly familiar way, like she needs to wait for herself, or catch up.

She forces her attention to wander from her body, and it settles instead on the room.

The antique vanity is next to the south-facing window where the light is softest. He's kneeling on the floor in front of her and her back is arched, his hair too short to grasp, her fingernails digging into his scalp instead. Her makeup is organized by colour and category in its velvet drawers, and only a few items sit on its inlaid mahogany top. Scott moves from the floor to the bed, pressing his chest against hers and kissing her, his mouth wet with her, and his cock twitching against her thigh. On the vanity is an empty sterling silver compact and a 1950s crystal atomizer she'd bought from a rummage sale in honour of the program they're developing. He eases into her and she rocks her hips up to meet him, eliciting a soft moan and a whispered  _Tess_. Next to the atomizer is a boar bristle brush from her grandmother with the brand name embossed in gold nearly worn off the handle.

Its mirror reflects her clearly when she's seated in front of it with brushes in her hands. It shows her distorted in broad ripples from the angle of view of the bed, and she catches herself examining the arch of her back and the articulation of her hip: one knee is pressed to her chest, her ankle over Scott's shoulder; the other leg hooked around the small of his back, pulling him deeper inside her; her mouth in his hair, his mouth on her collarbone; his hands braced on the mattress, one of hers cupped around her own breast.

She squeezes her eyes shut to block out the tableau. But the reflection is so fresh in her memory that it's no use. It's all she can feel—not the stretch of Scott inside her but the stretch of the hamstring, the knee, the hip, the curve of the spine, and the concomitant image that springs immediately to mind, the cascading effect that would result from making an adjustment to any angle in the series.

He groans into her neck, he must be close; she helps him along with the heel in the small of his back and her fingernails digging into his shoulders and her teeth on his earlobe, and he falls apart inside her, mercifully quick.

He rolls off her after to catch his breath, and pulls her after him so she's half-draped across his chest, hair in her eyes, mirror out of view. He slides a hand down her front and dips two fingertips inside her, drawing them out to smear his come across her. It feels distant from her somehow, like she's watching someone else's body.

"I think I'm good," she says, and kisses him lightly on the forehead, and stands up and stretches with a languor she does not feel to camouflage the urgency of her escape to the shower in the ensuite.

The mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet is not visible from behind the curtain, and even if it were, her reflection would be obscured by steam.

In the weeks that follow, every time she feels like a muscle memory has fallen into place in the new order of movement, another one is added to the regime, and she's clumsy and unfamiliar to herself all over again, in video review and on the ice, every morning, six mornings a week.

"You haven't seemed like yourself lately," he says on a Saturday evening they'd set aside specifically for relaxing. With no training that day, he'd insisted on ordering a pizza and then taking books to bed, and would brook no argument. He has a biography of Ken Dryden and she, a collection of poems by Anne Szumigalski she'd picked up in Saskatoon a couple of years ago, into which she's made no headway.

"I am," she says. "Same as ever, I'm just tired." He sets down his book on the edge of the bed and beckons her into his arms, and she accedes, giving up on the pretence of reading.

The words spring to mind by reflex and they sound plausible coming out of her mouth. She can't remember learning how to skate the first time. To be forced to pay close attention to what used to be second nature or risk losing it had been more exhausting than she could have anticipated, even though they'd all warned her.

"It's just been a while since," Scott pauses for a moment. "You know. Usually it's, uh, easier for you."

"It's easy," she says. Then, emboldened by the need to prove it: "I can show you if you want."

She feels his sharp intake of breath with her cheek against his chest. She'd never offered before, and he'd never asked.

"I don't want to make you self-conscious or anything," he says.

"I'm not," she says, already sitting up again and reaching for the drawer in the nightstand, where there's a black satin bag with a ribbon drawstring and a little dark purple vibrator curved to fit her palm. It occurs to her that she can't recall the last time she charged it, or used it. Maybe she really has just been tired.

"How do you want me to—" he starts, but she arranges him around herself wordlessly, pushing him onto his side, facing her; he stretches out one arm and wraps it around her shoulders, not pulling her too close, his hand on her neck where he could reach to cradle her jaw or stroke her hair. His free hand brushes lightly across one breast and then the other. She swings a leg over his hip.

"This isn't how I want you to touch me, though," she says, suddenly a little defensive. "It's, you know."

"Habit?" he says. "I just want what you want, Tess. I don't want you to feel like you have to perform for me, or whatever, I—"

A week ago she'd found an old Hermès scarf of Kate's and draped it over the half of the vanity mirror that discloses the bed, but even so, the mention of performance draws her attention to the mirror in her peripheral vision.

"Don't make it weird," she says, and he laughs and kisses her temple.

She spreads herself open with the fingers of her left hand and cups her palm over herself with the right, the tip of the vibrator pressed snug against her clit, flicks it on, pleased that it rumbles to life. Almost mechanically her body responds to it, with a shudder in her thigh that makes him pull her closer to him, and she closes her eyes.

The orgasm, when it arrives, is a perfunctory one.

Like clockwork, her pulse quickens and for a moment she can feel it pound in her throat. A bead of sweat trickles along her hairline and her breathing is laboured, and then in a split second it's over, and she's too sensitive to carry on and her thighs clamp together of their own accord, and she moves her hands away, overcome by a wave of exhaustion and an abrupt chilly disinterest in her own body.

He's whispering endearments into her hair, she notices, and his hands have moved, one of them resting on her taut abdomen, the other cupped around her shoulder. It takes a few moments for the whispers to resolve into words for her, and when they do, it's not an endearment at all, but one of their affirmations from the list of platitudes that she's stubbornly refused to commit to memory,  _you're so strong, you're so strong_.

Later, after Scott's gone home for the night, she finds a second wind and tries again. Maybe it was stage fright. The afternoon had been unusually humid for June and she hadn't opened the bedroom window to admit a breeze, and maybe his arm around her was too hot.

The mechanical stimulus-and-response rote orgasm is the best she can draw out of herself, no matter where she lets her mind take her. Her body feels like it's constricted somehow, and curiously detached from any experience of desire.

The exercise is, however, exhausting, and she sleeps so soundly afterward that she misses the next morning's alarm, and it's only Scott's telephone call at six-thirty to tell her he's running late that rouses her.

July brings the only preseason calendar landmark she'd allowed herself to look forward to: an entire afternoon with a camera crew, a photographer, a dozen cocktail dresses, film props, and a reason to put on her best Audrey Hepburn impression, for some cheesy CBC thing Marina had rolled her eyes at when it was proposed to them. After the filming wraps they have the ice for another hour and she spends it with Scott still in character, all quick movements in close hold and affects of exaggerated joy. The sense that she's still her own person, that she's got to be, to be able to put a character on top, makes her feel more like herself than she had in months, and she kisses him spontaneously in the dark on the sidewalk outside, dissolving into laughter when he dips her like Fred Astaire.

"I'm not doing this just to humour you, you know," Scott calls to her from around the back of his car in the otherwise empty lot afterward, arranging their gear and the garment bags of borrowed dresses in the trunk, having demanded that she sit down and rest.

"You just wore a trilby in front of a camera crew for six hours," she calls back through the open driver's side door. "You're gonna tell me that was your considered opinion about what you should be doing tonight?"

"All of it," he says, and slides into the driver's seat next to her and closing the door behind him. "This whole functional movement thing. You think I'm here 'cause I feel sorry for you or something, but I don't."

"I don't think that," she says.

"We're gonna be better because of this," he says.

"In spite of it," she says. "It's a lot of time to waste."

"I meant what I said," he says. "I gotta be able to keep up with you, and if you're stronger, then I'm stronger, and it's worth whatever we had to do."

She leans in to kiss him in answer, but as herself, no veil of character, the way he's always liked it from her, fiercely, with teeth. She palms him through his jeans and he nearly leaps out of the seat, "Tessa, we're in public," but she bites his lip and swallows his objection and he helps her unzip his jeans, helps her shove them a little way down his hips, fumbles with the lever to tilt the seat back, and swears when she takes him into her mouth.

Her lipstick is something scarlet and glossy and lacquer-thick from the makeup artist, not her usual transfer-proof matte, and even without seeing she can feel it smear halfway across her cheek and down her chin, and all over Scott, all over the front of his jeans, mixed with her saliva. His hips jerk up toward her and she shoves her fingers into his mouth when she can taste that he's about to come and he does, biting her and whimpering incoherently.

For a minute he can't open his eyes, and she luxuriates in it, her head resting in his lap, how helpless he is for her.

"Maybe you wanna clean up a little," he says when she sits upright again, gesturing toward her face with a hand still trembling. "I, uh, sorry about your lipstick, there's Kleenex in the glove box."

"Don't question my style choices," she says, and he laughs, his own mouth bitten and smudged nearly as red as hers, and he tugs her into his lap, her thigh catching on the stick shift in a way that'll definitely bruise, and slides his fingers down the front of her leggings and into her, hot and slick. She can feel how wet she is, and can hear it even, and his fingers are practiced and it's—

"I think someone's coming," she says, hearing the crunch of gravel in the distance, and a pair of high beams round the corner into the lot.

"What, like they won't already know you've got it bad for a trilby," he says, but withdraws his hand and releases her. She shifts off his lap and back into the passenger seat as he rebuttons his jeans and starts the car.

At home alone, she doesn't turn the light on in the ensuite, just applies and reapplies cold cream without looking at her own face until no more smears of red come away on her hands.

The day their program is announced, in August, is excruciating. She grits her teeth through it to stay in character as someone capable of optimism, and it's transparent to Scott, who sticks close to her all afternoon, takes her to a diner and pays for what he says are celebratory hamburgers that they enjoy in grim silence, drives her home, and follows her inside to the chesterfield in the living room.

"You were right that I haven't been myself," she says, and she thinks it's to his credit that he only nods and sits down next to her.

"I feel clumsy all the time," she adds. "Like I don't know what I'm doing and like I couldn't be spontaneous if I tried, and I don't know if it's getting better, and—"

"It is," says Scott, who's looking at her hands like he wants to take them between his.

"I don't feel it," she says. "It's just like, I know how it's supposed to feel, when I move, but all I can feel is that it's still wrong."

"Step by step," he says, verbatim from the list of platitudes. She rolls her eyes, and he adds, "I just mean that you don't have to feel good about it to keep going, you know? Take my word for it or don't, just show up every day like it's getting somewhere, and we'll see."

"It's been months already, so what's a few more," she says.

"Exactly," he says. "But you've been spontaneous, it hasn't been all business all the time all summer."

"When," she says.

"In the car, you felt different," he says, just as she realizes what he must be recalling, and she feels a hot self-conscious flush creep down her chest.

"Helps that there's no mirrors in there where you can see your whole body," he adds.

"Oh," she says. "You noticed."

"I'm not just a pretty face," he says.

He's looking at his own hands now, and she takes the right one and moves it to her breast. His hissed intake of breath sounds like her name.

"I don't want to push anything," he murmurs.

"We got interrupted in the car," she says, and he tugs her into his lap then, and she curls into the same awkward cramped shape, and he slides his hand under the waistband of her leggings like he had before.

His fingers are softer this time, exploratory, not pressing deeper into her until she grabs his wrist impatiently; and he sets a slower rhythm than her usual preference, leaving her breathless and waiting, and it's a surprise to her when she finds she was teetering on the brink of orgasm only by being pushed over it, and then again a few minutes later when he doesn't withdraw his fingers from her but keeps them moving, gasping and swollen, and her come smeared up his palm to the wrist.

"I knew you had it in you," he says, his other arm still wrapped tightly around her, and kisses her hair.

"Haven't yet, but if you're offering," she says, and reaches for him through his jeans. He swats her hand away.

"Step by step," he says again, and she snorts derisively. "I'm gonna go get cleaned up."

He lingers in the ensuite for a few minutes after she hears the shower shut off, and he kisses her fondly on the forehead when he leaves, but it's not until later she notices that he'd written her a note on the mirror next to the now rather steam-warped list of affirmations: SOMETIMES THE WORK OF COPING IS FAKING IT (DON'T FAKE ORGASMS THOUGH), the neatest block capitals she'd ever seen out of him, in cherry red lip liner.

She leaves it there, recites it soberly the next morning after the rest through the mouthful of toothpaste and the faceful of moisturizer, and repeats it to him in the car at quarter to seven, making him cackle.

"There's worse things to be than well-meaning and stupid," he intones in the declamatory affirmation style, and he's right about that, too.


End file.
